Many typical wireless communication devices (e.g. User Equipment—UE or mobile station) use a single radio (RF) transceiver to handle traffic from two or more radio access technologies (RATs; UMTS LTE—Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, Long Term Evolution—and GSM—Global System for Mobile communications—will be used herein as a non-limiting example).
Such devices may use network signaling to determine when to switch from a packet switched (PS) communication (e.g. UMTS LTE) to a circuit switched (CS) communication (e.g. a legacy radio access technology such as GSM). The circuit switched fallback (CSFB) helps the UMTS LTE network to handle a CS call by moving the connection to a legacy RAT, and then moving back to UMTS LTE when the CS call is over.
Due to the Idle state Signaling Reduction (ISR) feature, a device may—while it is connected to the UMTS LTE network—also get a CS paging message from a legacy (CS) network (e.g. GSM, UMTS—Universal Mobile Telecommunication Standard, WCDMA—Wideband Code Division Multiple Access, TD-SCDMA—Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access, etc.).
So, if the device can read the CS paging messages from the legacy network in parallel to being connected to the UMTS LTE network (possibly with an on-going data call), then the device can quickly do the CS call set up in the legacy network. This will allow the device to be connected to or camp on UMTS LTE cells also in networks where CSFB support has not been rolled out, and also will provide an advantage over CSFB of providing faster CS call set up than CSFB.
To achieve reading of CS paging from the legacy network while being connected in UMTS LTE, a device with a single radio transceiver for these purposes faces a problem since it has only one radio block (transceiver) and that block needs to be shared between UMTS LTE and legacy page monitoring. If UMTS LTE data transfer is on-going, then the reading in parallel of CS paging from the legacy network will affect the data transfer in UMTS LTE (e.g. some packet throughput loss may happen).
This is scenario is especially cumbersome for a scenario where an UMTS LTE (TDD—Time Division Duplex) data call is on-going while the device needs to monitor paging from the GSM network.
There is a need for methods and arrangements for a single radio transceiver device that provide efficient allocation of the transceiver for paging reception in one network during communication in another network.